Research Literature Review
Search, read and summarize academic papers across local PDFs, Zotero, Obsidian and the web.
- Stars
- 18,482
- Licence
- MIT
- Files
- 1 file
What it does
When you ask for papers on a topic, this skill tells the agent to search several sources in a set order: your local PDF folders, Zotero and Obsidian if connected, and then the web, arXiv and optional academic APIs. It reads the first few pages of local PDFs and collects titles, abstracts and authors, then summarizes the key ideas for you. By default it only fetches metadata from arXiv and does not download files unless you turn that on.
Great for
- Researchers starting a literature review or related-work section
- Students who need to understand what a specific academic paper says
- People who already keep a Zotero or Obsidian research library and want the agent to search it
Skip it if
- Final verification of citations: the skill summarizes sources it finds, and the file does not describe checks that confirm every reference is real or accurately quoted
- Large private collections if you do not want PDF content sent to web-search or AI-discovery services (the optional sources send queries outside your machine)
Try asking
- “find papers on diffusion models for protein design and summarize the key ideas”
- “write a related work section on sparse attention, using my papers folder and Zotero”
- “what does this paper say? [paste arXiv URL]”
- “literature review on retrieval-augmented generation — sources: web, semantic-scholar”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 1 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.
research-lit.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip research-lit.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip research-lit.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Name your sources explicitly (for example, sources: zotero, local) to keep searches private and focused
- Keep the default arXiv download setting off unless you want PDFs saved to your library
- Check any summary against the original paper before citing it
What's inside
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from wanshuiyin/Auto-claude-code-research-in-sleep under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.